The eighteenth century did not kill literature in Portugal any more than in other countries, but poetry had lost its lyrism, and under the influence of French and English writers assumed a scientific, philosophical, or utilitarian character. No mighty genius arose in Portuguese literature at the bidding of João V (1706-50), but the king’s lavish patronage gave an impulse, and he founded the _Academia Real de Historia_ in 1720. A crop of scholars and poets followed in the second half of the century, so that it was not without some unfairness that Giuseppe Baretti wrote of the Portuguese in 1760 that _di letteratura non hanno punto fama d’essere soverchio ghiotti ... quel poco que scrivono, sia in prosa sia in verso, è tutto panciuto e pettoruto_.[629] It was the age of Arcadias: the famous _Arcadia Ulyssiponense_[630] (1756-74) and the _Nova Arcadia_ founded in 1790 (i. e. precisely a century after the Italian _Arcadia_). All the poets of the century belonged to one or other of these societies or made their mark as _dissidentes_ from them. One of the founders of the _Nova Arcadia_, FRANCISCO JOAQUIM BINGRE (1763-1856), lived on into the middle of the nineteenth century, and a few of his poems were collected under the title _O Moribundo Cysne do Vouga_ (1850). A typical eighteenth-century poet is D. FRANCISCO XAVIER DE MENESES (1673-1743), fourth Conde da Ericeira, who in turning to literature was but following the traditions of his family. A staunch defender of pure Portuguese against those who, he said, disfigure and corrupt the language by the introduction of foreign words and phrases, he wrote a large number of works in prose and in verse. The best known of them is his _Henriqueida_ (1741), a heroic poem on the conquest of Portugal by Count Henry in twelve long cantos of prosaic _oitavas_. It may contain lines more inspiring than these: E a contramina fabricou Roberto, Da mina conhecendo o lugar certo, but they do not really differ greatly from the rest of the poem. The large quantity of poetry still written at the beginning of the century had met with severe criticism in Frei Lucas de Santa Catharina’s _Seram Politico_. He slyly calls the _egloga campestre_ ‘_poesia ervada_’. The objects of the _Arcadia_ of 1756 were to free Portuguese literature from foreign influences and restore the purity of the language. If to some extent it merely substituted French or Italian influence for Spanish, its cry was also back to the classics and to the Portuguese _quinhentistas_. As to the language its services were invaluable, for at a time when French influence was great in Portugal and in the rest of Europe it checked the use of gallicisms; as to literature the attempt to write poetry on an ordered plan was perhaps foredoomed to failure: it plodded along in an artificial atmosphere of Roman gods and antiquities, and became hidebound in imitation of the Horatian ode.